Has anyone on the forum attended any of the conferences for CS6? I am attending the one in Cape Town - South Africa tomorrow. I am pretty excited, being so new to After Effects as a whole, I have no idea what to expect.

It starts at 8am and goes through the day till 17H00, so it should be a pretty filled day. Ill comment on Friday for anyone who is interrested.

It would be interesting to know whether these things actually teach you something useful, or if they're simply day-long demos of software that leave you asking, "Well, I learned that it's possible to do this effect, but how do I actually go about doing it?".

I saw Jason Levine once. He used to be kinda funny, though after all this years I wouldn't vouch for the quality of his jokes. He may have overused them. Otherwise be simply prepared for a lot of pretty talking and limited caloric value. This is a marketing tour, after all, and you shouldn't expect too many answers to your burning questions. Even if the guys are nice, they are tied to Adobe's policies and can't possibly give you too much info that you couldn't get elsewhere...

Ok, first off, let me reiterate the fact that I am very new to the Adobe range of products....... having said that, -

For me, the days experience was awesome. The possibilities are endless, and the effort given to add real-value changes to existing products is definitely encouraging to me. I have to agree though, this was a marketing demo, so it was a case of mind-blowing possibilities, with little show on the "how-to", but that is what was expected. All in all, it was an encouraging day, fun-filled, as Jason is still a funny guy, and Paul and Terry had their own brand of humour thrown in. :-)

The one-on-one questions were not really all that possible, as the show ended pretty late, but I suppose that was a personal choice - I think the team was willing to stay behind to chat if anyone wanted to.

so, in closing - it was well worth the time, purely to see what is available - for an idea of where to focus your research for what you want to use the Adobe products for, and also for getting that warm-fuzzy feeling that Adobe is trying to keep up to date with the clients requirements and requests.

Well done to the Adobe Team, the local team for the set up and organization, the background technical teams responsible for CS6 and all the new features, and the evangelist team for making it fun, interresting and memorable.

That sounds great, but I also know how it feels when you see something awesome and all you really want is step by step instruction on how they did it. If you're interested, here's a page full of links to After Effects resources, such as tutorials: http://bit.ly/c06llu